As the popularity of the Internet increases, the number of users who want to purchase items or receive information about items over the Internet, as well as the number of service providers that offer such services, such as electronic marketplaces, exponentially grow. Advantages of purchasing from/through an electronic marketplace are numerous. For example, an electronic marketplace can include offers for items from several different merchants, parties, or sources, for example, whereby users (e.g., customers) can compare several offers for an item, where each offer corresponds to a different source, and may include different terms, such as merchant-specific pricing, shipping charges, promotions, conditions, and quality, etc. Electronic marketplaces also facilitate advertising campaigns or offer promotions to attract more users to their Web site. One of the most important aspects of promotions and advertisement campaigning may be providing a good customer experience which will lead new customers to have an interest in, or to purchase or otherwise consume, items through the electronic marketplace.
However, some promotions can attract an unexpectedly high number of users to visit an electronic marketplace, which causes an unusual peak of traffic to a Web server of the electronic marketplace. For example, the electronic marketplace may offer special holiday promotions (e.g., an after-Thanksgiving sale, Christmas promotions, etc.) in which any user can participate through a promotion Web page. If the special holiday promotions are offered for a small window of time and/or for a limited number of items, a massive number of users, for example several millions of users, may want to access and participate in such holiday promotions during that time. Each user may request to connect to the Web server numerous times during a short period of time. For example, it is very common that many users continuously hit or refresh the promotion Web page until the promotion becomes available, or they gain a better position to obtain the promotion. However, as each hit generally requires a connection with the Web server, the connections that can accommodate such requests from the massive number of users can be far above the normal number of connections that the Web server is able to handle. If the connection requests are gravely more than those of the Web server can handle at a given time, the Web server may brownout, have to refuse taking any connection requests, or issue error messages for connection requests. This results in a bad customer experience for many users. Further, some users may then perceive that the electronic marketplace is not reliable for commerce transactions even during non-peak times. One solution may be to predict abnormal peaks of traffic and use enough numbers of servers that can manage such abnormal peaks of traffic. However, this approach can be costly and can be a waste of resources, considering that the unusual peak of traffic may only occur a few times a year.